South Dakota Senate Bill 176 is a well-intentioned piece of legislation that if passed; will make my life so much harder and no one safer.

I suffer from chronic pancreatitis and thus, I require frequent medicated pain relief. Currently, the only viable option for my severe pain is a class of drugs known as opioids. There are loads of patients like me all over S.D. that require this class of medicine, with this scary-sounding word.

Let me be clear: SB176 will solve nothing and only scare doctors from helping patients like me.

Those who need pain relief will now be less likely to get treated because doctors will afraid of getting in trouble and being arrested. Patients like me are obeying the law.

Those people who are dying from the “opioid epidemic” are being killed off due to their recreational drug use. The drugs they use, such as meth and heroin are being laced with a drug call carfentanil.

Carfentanil is the veterinary version of fentanyl. Fentanyl is used to treat the pain of patients who are dying, otherwise known as end-of-life care. Fentanyl isn’t mass prescribed because it is severely powerful and easy to overdose outside of a hospital setting. Carfentanil is 100 times more powerful than that.

The bill gives a 7-day limit. Why seven days? It can take several months for bone and muscle tissue to heal after surgery. And chronic pain can last for years.

And do we really want the police arresting sufferer and the disabled because the bureaucrats think a 7-day limitation is a good idea? Why do I have to prove to a bureaucrat my chronic pancreatitis, so I can get treatment?

S.D. legislators, before you vote on this bill, ask yourself: How does making it harder for me to get my legal oxycontin prescription, stop the death of meth users?